French Political Culture in the 1970shomepages.ed.ac.uk/echabal/frenchpolcult70s.pdf · 13...

French Political Culture in the 1970s

Liberalism, Identity Politics and the Modest State

by Emile Chabal*

Abstract: French politics in the 1970s is notoriously hard to decipher. The increasinglyviolent attacks on Gaullism and Communism, the decline in French geopoliticalpower, and the end of postwar economic growth led to unprecedented unease aboutthe nation’s collective future. But rather than treat the 1970s as an endpoint, I argue inthis article that the 1970s represented a new beginning. I explore how more modestconceptions of political action, the emergence of a new kind of liberalism, and thedevelopment of identity politics led to a profound transformation of French politicalculture – one that tried to reconcile France’s long statist tradition with the realities ofan ever-more fragmented polity.

“La France est veuve”. These were the words Georges Pompidou used toannounce the death of Charles de Gaulle to the French people on 10 November1970.1 France was now widowed, the nation had been abandoned to its fate. Thebeloved General, whose complex image had dominated French politics for theprevious decade, was gone.2 Henceforth, the French would be in charge of theirown destiny. Yet there was still hope amidst the mourning. When de Gaulle hadfirst returned to politics in 1958, France was in the grip of a calamitous conflictin Algeria and on the verge of civil war.3 By the time he died, the countryappeared to be in much better shape. It had renewed institutions, a strongpresidency, sustained economic growth and an assured place in Europe. As faras Gaullists were concerned, the template was set and the Fifth Republic wassecure; their commitment to the General had been fully vindicated. But eventhose on the left who had spent years railing against de Gaulle’s authoritari-

* This article was the product of some extremely difficult circumstances. My first thanksgo to Akhila Yechury for her support, care and attention. I am also grateful to SonjaLevsen for her patience and for pushing me towards the finish line. The ideas I develophere owe a great deal to conversations with Iain Stewart, Michael Behrent, PatrickSoulsby, David Priestland, Claire Eldridge, Stephan Malinowski, Tim Peace and SudhirHazareesingh. Long may their ideas continue to percolate! This piece is dedicated to myfather who was very much a product of the 1970s and whose memory continues toinspire me.

1 Office national de radiodiffusion t�l�vision franÅaise, D�claration de Georges Pompidouon Journal T�l�vis� de 13 h, 10 November 1970, http://www.ina.fr/video/CAF87002160.

2 On the myth of de Gaulle, see Sudhir Hazareesingh, In the Shadow of the General.Modern France and the Myth of de Gaulle, Oxford 2012.

3 Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization. The Algerian War and the Remaking ofFrance, London 2008.

Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42. 2016, S. 243 – 265� Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Gçttingen 2016ISSN (Printausgabe): 0340-613X, ISSN (online): 2196-9000

http://www.v-r.de/de

anism could quietly celebrate: yes, the left had been battered in the lastlegislative elections of 1968, but the passing of de Gaulle offered hope that realchange might come sooner rather than later.Unfortunately, many of these hopes were dashed. The left did eventually claima long-awaited election victory in May 1981 but the young Parti socialiste (PS)activists who thronged the streets to celebrate their successes were soonconfronted with the harsh realities of the decade they had just left behind.Deindustrialization, rising unemployment and the pressures of the EuropeanMonetary System shattered their dreams of Keynesian state socialism, and therise of the Front National was an unsettling reminder of France’s colonial andcollaborationist past. Globally, too, the newly-elected French socialists were onthe margins. Neo-liberalism was making serious inroads into internationalpolitics and France was beginning to lose control of a European project that ithad tried to fashion in its own image. Above all, the French had experienced acrisis of confidence over the course of the 1970s. Old certainties had beenwashed away and ideologies had been challenged. In 1970, France waswidowed, but the French could still think of themselves as a great nation. By1980, the overwhelming feeling was one of exhaustion or, as the philosopherGilles Lipovetsky famously put it, “emptiness”.4

Not surprisingly, then, the 1970s have generally had a rather mixed reputationin France. The apparently overwhelming narrative of France’s transition froma booming industrial economy in the 1960s to a stagnant post-industrial one inthe 1980s has led to a mix of disillusionment and nostalgia on all sides of thepolitical spectrum. Gaullists view the 1970s as a decade when the legacy of deGaulle was gradually dismantled by non-Gaullist and left-wing movements,while militant gauchistes see the 1970s both as a missed opportunity and anuncomfortable transitional phase between the all-encompassing revolutionarypolitics of the 1960s and the narrow, issue-based politics of the 1980s. Thisuncertainty is reinforced by the feeling that the 1970s marked the end of an erain French intellectual life, symbolised by the death of Jean-Paul Sartre in April1980. The slow atrophy of Marxism provided spaces for a wide variety of non-Marxist intellectual currents, most notably liberalism, but none of themseemed to give much direction to the great political struggles of the era. Indeed,when the socialists came to power in 1981 they bemoaned the “silence” ofintellectuals who were no longer willing to validate, even as fellow travellers,the left-wing principles with which they had so often been associated inprevious decades.5 At a much broader level, the disappearance of de Gaulle,mushrooming unemployment and the rise of the “immigration problem” fixeda popular perception of the 1970s in France as a tipping point between a

4 Gilles Lipovetsky, L’�re du vide. Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain, Paris 1983.5 Max Gallo, Le silence des intellectuels, in: Le Monde, 26. 7. 1983.


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“Gaullist politics of grandeur” in the 1960s and the brittle, fragmented politicsof the 1980s and 1990s.6

Much of this ambiguity about the 1970s in France can be understood as aresponse to an intense period of political, economic, social and culturalupheaval. While the 1970s are viewed more positively in France than, say, in theUnited Kingdom, there is still a deep sense of dislocation and confusion aboutwhat exactly the decade is supposed to represent. As many Europeanhistorians have observed, the 1970s saw the end of a certain pattern of post-wareconomic planning, the disintegration of a broadly Christian democraticpolitical consensus and a sustained attack on hierarchical social norms.7 But aconcern with endings has obscured the novelty of these years. If we take abroader and more conceptual view, as some scholars have begun to do, we cansee the 1970s differently : Some have identified a new spirit of capitalism in thisperiod; others have talked about a new configuration of power in Europe andNorth America. In both of these interpretations, the 1970s represent a keymoment when post-war technocratic elites across the Western world wereincreasingly under fire from dynamic young managers and a new generation ofintellectuals turned away from rigid conceptions of power.8 Drawing on theseinnovative historical and social scientific approaches, I argue that similarprocesses were at work in the French context. French elites were forced to adaptto a changing context and, in so doing, they began to alter the parameters ofpolitical debate and political practice.I focus my attention in this article on political culture, which is a notoriouslydifficult term to define. As in my earlier research, I use this term to describe thenorms, values, languages and symbols that circulate within a given politicalsystem.9 Specifically, I am interested in how French politics accommodated thewide range of new political actors that emerged in the 1970s as a result ofindustrialization, urbanization, decolonization, and the demographic shifts ofthe post-war years.10 It is not possible to capture the entirety of these changes

6 On de Gaulle’s ideas of grandeur see, amongst others, Philip G. Cerny, The Politics ofGrandeur. Ideological Aspects of de Gaulle’s Foreign Policy, Cambridge 1980; StanleyHoffmann, Decline or Renewal? France since the 1930s, New York 1974.

7 This has been exacerbated by existing historical literature on the post-war period, whichhas tended to see the 1970s as the endpoint of the “post-war moment”. See for instanceTony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe Since 1945, London 2005; Martin Conway, TheRise and Fall of Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945 – 1973, in: ContemporaryEuropean History 13. 2004, pp. 67 – 88.

8 For contrasting perspectives, see Luc Boltanski and ðve Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit ducapitalisme, Paris 1999; David Priestland, Merchant, Soldier, Sage. A New History ofPower, London 2012.

9 Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic. Nation, State and Citizenship in ContemporaryFrance, Cambridge 2015.

10 For a comprehensive assessment, see Henri Mendras and Alistair Cole, Social Change inModern France. Towards a Cultural Anthropology of the Fifth Republic, Cambridge1991.


French Political Culture in the 1970s 245



in a short article, but I nevertheless want to adopt a multi-layered analysis thatincludes intellectual, cultural and political approaches. In the first section, Iconcentrate on the crucial changes in French intellectual life after 1968. Iemphasize how the legacy of 1968 and the fragmentation of Marxismencouraged a more modest form of political engagement. In the secondsection, I explore how these changes were played out in party political circles,with a particular emphasis on Val�ry Giscard d’Estaing’s idea of a “soci�t�lib�rale avanc�e” and the emergence of a French form of neo-liberalism.Finally, I turn my attention to a crucial aspect of French political culture in the1970s: identity and immigrant politics. This broadens the scope of the articleby showing how changes that were taking place in the rarefied universe of theParisian intellectual elites and the corridors of power were received, adaptedand manipulated by a new constituency of political activists.A multi-layered approach such as this makes it possible to see more clearly howFrench political actors mobilized new ideas and adapted to changingcircumstances. After the violence of decolonization in the early 1960s andthe protests of 1968, the 1970s appear to be a period of relative quiescence inFrance, especially in comparison to the years of economic crisis in Britain orthe threat of far-left terrorism in Germany and Italy. Yet the changes that tookplace were still profound. The shift in French intellectual life towards morecontextually sensitive and modest theoretical frameworks, the active attemptsby politicians to bring politics “closer” to the people, and the emergence ofpostcolonial identity politics all amounted to a significant reorientation ofFrench politics by the late 1970s. Admittedly, the success of Mitterrand’s“Jacobin” brand of socialism in 1981 did not immediately suggest that Frenchpolitical culture had changed dramatically over the preceding decade. But bythe time Mitterrand’s tenure came to an end in 1995, it was clear that Francehad become a more liberal, individualist and politically fragmented society.11

There is little doubt that the slow transformation of political culture that beganin the 1970s played a major role in this deep change in France’s politicallandscape.

I. Intellectual Reconfigurations after 1968

It is impossible to understand the politics of the 1970s without reference toFrance’s intellectual landscape. It was here that emerging questions werediscussed most explicitly. Even if many intellectual debates took place within arelatively small and elite circle, their repercussions were felt much more broadlyacross French society and, as I discuss later, in the world of French party and

11 There is now an extensive sociological and political science literature on thefragmentation of French politics in the 1990s. Particularly relevant in this context isPierre Br�chon et al. (eds.), Les cultures politiques des FranÅais, Paris 2000.


246 Emile Chabal



activist politics as well. A brief sketch of the intellectual reconfigurations of the1970s therefore provides the essential context for understanding the kinds ofpolitical language and symbols that underpinned the 1970s. In particular, I wantto draw attention to three interconnected tendencies in French intellectual life:the collapse of Marxism, the liberal revival, and the development of a moremodest conception of political action.If there is one dominant image of intellectual life in the years after 1968, it is theexplosion and subsequent collapse of France’s Marxist consensus, which hadits roots in a deep crisis of the political left. As is now well-known, the Sovietinvasion of Hungary in 1956, the Algerian War and the protests of 1968 dealt asevere blow to left-wing unity in France. While 1956 led to a mass exodus awayfrom the largest left-wing movement in post-war France, the Parti communistefranÅais (PCF), the Algerian War destroyed the legitimacy of the non-Communist left.12 A generation of young activists brought up on anti-colonialpolitics could not accept that it was a socialist Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, whohad sent troops to quell the growing unrest in Algeria in 1956 / 1957. Theyabandoned him and his party, the Section franÅaise de l’Internationaleouvri�re (SFIO), in droves, a process that eventually led to the formation of thedissident left-wing party, the Parti socialiste unifi� (PSU) in 1960.13 Thesedivisions meant that the left played almost no part in the foundation andelaboration of the new constitutional settlement of the Fifth Republic from1958 to 1962. It was simply too weak and divided to exercise any power overpolitical events.The impotence of the established organizations of the left was reinforced fromMay to June 1968 when student and worker demonstrations erupted acrossFrance.14 Of the main parties, only the PSU actively supported the protestors;the PCF and what was left of the SFIO kept their distance. This complete failureon the left to take advantage of a potentially promising situation, as well as adeep-rooted fear amongst the French electorate that a new revolutionarysituation was developing, meant that all the left-wing parties were obliteratedin the legislative elections of June 1968. With only 91 out of 481 seats, theparliamentary left was well and truly on its knees in the early 1970s. There werenevertheless signs of renewal on the horizon. The creation of the PS in 1971provided a united platform for the non-Communist left and helped break withthe colonial blunders of the past. At the same time, the PCF put aside its

12 For an overview of these debates on the left, see Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution. TheIntellectual Left in Postwar France, London 1993.

13 Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-FranÅois Sirinelli (eds.), La guerre d’Alg�rie et lesintellectuels franÅais, Paris 1988.

14 This is not the place to discuss the now voluminous literature on 1968. For differentintroductory interpretations, see Jean-FranÅois Sirinelli, Mai 68. L’�v�nement Janus,Paris 2008; Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68. L’h�ritage impossible, Paris 2002; Boris Gobille,Mai 68, Paris 2008; Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution. Parisian Students andWorkers in 1968, London 2004.





differences with the socialists and signed a “Common Programme” with theparty that lasted from 1972 to 1977. Although Socialist and Communist unityfaltered after the inability of the left to gain a parliamentary majority in theelections of 1978, the Common Programme paved the way for the PS toovertake the PCF as the largest party on the left. This fundamental change inpower balance ultimately helped push the left as a whole towards the victory of1981.15

Paradoxically, however, this strengthening of left-wing party politics was notaccompanied by a concomitant resurgence in left-wing intellectual life. On thecontrary, by the end of the 1970s, the Marxist framework that formed thestock-in-trade of most left-wing groups was under severe attack by Frenchintellectuals. Already the rhetoric of the protests of 1968 had been openlyhostile to orthodox Stalinist Communism, but the 1970s saw a much moregeneralized critique of Marxism in all its forms. The most famous expressionof this critique was the nouvelle philosophie: a virulently anti-totalitarian formof anti-Marxism, underpinned by a collection of polemical writings by youngphilosophers such as Pascal Bruckner, Bernard-Henri L�vy and Andr�Glucksmann. The main figures of this movement, the so-called nouveauxphilosophes, all published their first popular essays in the period from 1975 to1979 and enthusiastically marketed their ideas in the media.16 With the help ofthe well-known literary television programme “Apostrophes”, hosted byBernard Pivot, they quickly became a household name and a symbol of theanti-Marxist wave that was sweeping across French intellectual life.Of course, good sales and excellent publicity do not necessarily correlate withoriginal ideas. Even at the time, the nouveaux philosophes were attacked by theirpeers and their teachers – people like Claude Lefort and Raymond Aron –whose ideas they thought they were introducing to a wider audience.17 Inretrospect, it is also clear that the nouveaux philosophes were engaged as much ina political battle as a philosophical one. As Michael Scott Christofferson clearlyshows, the impetus for their controversial interventions was much less the“discovery” of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” than it was anattempt to warn the French electorate of the dangers of Communist rule at a time

15 For different perspectives on the post-war French left, see Jacques Julliard, Les gauchesfranÅaises 1752 – 2012. Histoire, politique et imaginaire, Paris 2012; Tony Judt, Marxismand the French Left. Studies in Labour and Politics in France 1830 – 1981, Oxford 1986and the dated but useful Richard W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left,London 1981.

16 The most important texts of the nouveaux philosophes included Andr� Glucksmann, Lacuisin�re et le mangeur d’hommes. R�flexions sur l’�tat, le marxisme et les camps deconcentration, Paris 1975; id. , Les ma�tres penseurs, Paris 1977; Bernard Henri-L�vy, LaBarbarie � visage humain, Paris 1977 and Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut, Lenouveau d�sordre amoureux, Paris 1977.

17 For instance, Lefort outlines his scepticism towards the nouveaux philosophes in hispreface to Claude Lefort, L’invention d�mocratique. Les limites de la dominationtotalitaire, Paris 1994, p. 6.


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when the Common Programme seemed like it might triumph in the legislativeelections of 1978.18 But, while these strategic considerations were clearly at theforefront of the immediate political struggle, hindsight allows us to see thenouveaux philosophes as something more. They were indicators of changes thatwere taking place across French intellectual life as a whole.Throughout the 1970s, left-wing radical politics in France was gradually decoupledfrom a Marxist framework. First the turn away from orthodox Marxism, and laterthe turn away from Marxism altogether, led to the formation of new groups with awide variety of interests, from radical feminism to the state of French prisons. Thiswas accompanied by a whole raft of new ideas, such as the concept of autogestion(self-government), which played a key role in the ideological orientation of theConf�d�ration d�mocratique du travail (CFDT) trade union and the PS in the late1970s.19 It was not simply that Marxism no longer formed the bedrock of Frenchintellectual life, it was also that the traditional master concepts of post-warEuropean Marxism seemed to be disappearing. Ideas of class or revolution, whichstill were crucial to the party political rhetoric of the PCF and the left-wing of thePS in the 1970s, were falling into abeyance in lecture rooms and journals. Youngactivists were asking new questions and drawing on alternative genealogies. Overtime, these coalesced around what Julian Bourg describes as a renewed interest in“ethics”, in other words, an explicit interest in the ethical foundations of politics.Whether in debates over Holocaust denial, biotechnology and AIDS, or therediscovery of thinkers like Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel L�vinas who had writtenextensively on ethics, Bourg argues that the French intellectual left becameincreasingly concerned with ethics through the late 1970s and early 1980s.20

Ultimately, this led to a wholesale reorientation of the French left away fromMarxist ideas of revolution and anti-capitalism towards a language of “respon-sibility” and “rights”, themes that would dominate intellectual discussions in the1980s. In this reading, the nouveaux philosophes were neither original norexceptional, they merely encapsulated the shifting mood of the late 1970s in theFrench left. Despite the polemical and simplistic tenor of an emblematic text of thenouvelle philosophie like L�vy’s “Barbarie � visage humain”, its obsession withgood and evil betrayed both the ethical concerns of its author and the changingcontours of the French intellectual left.21

18 This argument about the importance of the political context of anti-totalitarianism ismade particularly powerfully in Michael Scott Christofferson, Intellectuals Against theLeft. The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s, London 2004.

19 On this, see Herv� Hamon and Patrick Rotman, La Deuxi�me gauche. Histoireintellectuelle et politique de la CFDT, Paris 1984 and Chabal, A Divided Republic, esp.ch. 10.

20 Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics. May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought,Montreal 2007, pp. 16 f.

21 Bourg discusses in depth the relationship between the nouveaux philosophes and theethical turn in Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, Part IV.





In parallel with this renewal of interest in ethics, France’s intellectual classrediscovered liberalism in the 1970s. As with the ethical turn, it came in anumber of different forms and one can identify at least two strands within thisFrench liberal revival: one more conservative, the other closely attached to theleft. The more conservative strand of the liberal revival gathered around thefigure and legacy of the great post-war liberal intellectual Raymond Aron. Overthe course of the 1970s, a growing number of young intellectuals began to useAron in their attempts to build a new form of French liberalism that would act asa powerful focal point for criticisms of the Common Programme and offer aseductive alternative to Marxism.22 The most sustained expression of thisconservative liberal revival was the journal Commentaire, founded in 1978 byAron himself but essentially run by a younger group of intellectuals includingJean-Claude Casanova, Jean Baechler, and Alain BesanÅon.23 With its frequentreferences to a French liberal “canon” of Tocqueville, Guizot and Constant, itsconsistent attacks on the legacy of 1968, and a strongly anti-Communist line,Commentaire captured the emerging contours of a new conservative liberaldisposition in France, one that would become influential during the short-livedcentre-right government of Jacques Chirac between 1986 and 1988.24

But the liberal revival also had a more radical strand that stressed the potentialof liberal thought for a rejuvenation of political life in France. Influenced byautogestion, anti-totalitarianism and a desire to modernize Marxism, thisstrand has often been referred to as the deuxi�me gauche (second left) becauseof its influence on French socialism in the late 1970s. It was associated withfigures like the politician Michel Rocard, the historian FranÅois Furet and thepolitical scientist Pierre Rosanvallon, all of whom sought to challenge the“Jacobin” and “centralizing” tradition of the French left in their respectivefields. In the case of Rocard, the battle to bring liberalism to the heart of Frenchpolitics was played out publicly within the PS. After a long career in the PSU,Rocard rose to prominence in the newly-formed PS as one of the sternestcritics of Mitterrand’s Marxist and Jacobin rhetoric. Most famously, hearticulated his vision at the PS congress in Nantes in June 1977 when hedescribed the two cultures of the French left: one Jacobin, centralizing andprotectionist, the other flexible, decentralizing and open to modern capital-ism. His explicit identification with the latter made his speech into a watershedmoment for the deuxi�me gauche.25 By contrast, Furet brought liberalism to

22 Chabal, A Divided Republic, esp. ch. 6.23 On this, see Iain Stewart, France’s Anti-68 Liberal Revival, in: Emile Chabal (ed.), France

Since the 1970s. History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty, London 2014,pp. 199 – 223 and Gwendal Ch�ton, La libert�e retrouv�e. Une histoire du lib�ralismepolitique en France � travers les revues aroniennes “Contrepoint” et “Commentaire”,Ph. D. Diss. Universit� de Rennes 2006.

24 Chabal, A Divided Republic, ch. 10.25 Michel Rocard, Les deux cultures politiques, in: id. , Parler vrai. Textes politiques

pr�c�d�s d’un entretien avec Jacques Julliard, Paris 1979, pp. 76 – 84, here pp. 76 f.


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French historiography and the study of the French Revolution. In his famousessay “Penser la R�volution franÅaise” from 1978, he argued that theRevolution was not about class, but about ideas of political representation.In an explicit echo of contemporary anti-totalitarian debates, he explored howthe obsession of the revolutionaries with total politics carried within it theseeds of violence and terror. Readers at the time quickly understood that thiswas a liberal criticism of Communism and Jacobinism – a position that Furetnever refuted.26 As for Rosanvallon, his early involvement with the CFDT andthe dissident socialist journal Faire, which was founded in 1975, laid theideological foundations for the deuxi�me gauche and helped bring autogestionto a much wider audience.27

These debates were central to the political orientation of the PS. Rocard’sdefeat and the choice of Mitterrand as the PS’s winning candidate in 1981prevented the deuxi�me gauche from becoming the dominant tendency on thenon-Communist left, but it remained influential. For instance, the pro-diversity droit � la difference policies of the Socialist government after 1981, aswell as the party’s commitment to decentralization, all had their roots in theconcerns of the deuxi�me gauche. The legacy of thinkers like Furet andRosanvallon had a tremendous impact on the intellectual world in the 1980s,too: By the time of the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, mostcommentators were adamant that it was Furet’s interpretation that had becomethe new orthodoxy.28 In this sense, the deuxi�me gauche was a bridge betweenthe dispersed fragments of post-1968 anti-Communism and the conservativeliberalism of a journal like Commentaire. In the same way that the centre-rightdrew on the liberal revival as a way of transcending its Gaullist heritage, thecentre-left used it to modernize its Marxist heritage.With such a multiplicity of different intellectual trends, it is easy to see howcontemporaries interpreted the 1970s as a time of uncertainty and fragmenta-tion. Although the two largest single political groupings in French politics, theGaullists and the Communists, remained powerful, the legitimacy of theirfounding ideologies was being eroded throughout the 1970s. This openedspaces for alternative ideas. On the far-left, identity politics began to take holdwith organizations like the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP) or theFront homosexual d’action r�volutionnaire (FHAR) discussing ideas of power,domination and emancipation, and thinkers like Michel Foucault looking atthe history of these ideas. On the centre-left, the deuxi�me gauche pushed a

26 On Furet, see Chabal, A Divided Republic, ch. 7 and Michael S. Christofferson, AnAntitotalitarian History of the French Revolution. Francois Furet’s “Penser la Revolu-tion francaise” in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s, in: French Historical Studies22. 1999, pp. 557 – 611.

27 See especially the first issue of Faire, October 1975. Scanned copies of Faire are nowavailable to view in the PS online archives, http://www.archives-socialistes.fr/articles/page-187740.

28 Steven Kaplan, Adieu 89, Paris 1993.





liberalizing agenda deep into the heart of the PS and began to reconcile the leftwith identity politics. On the centre-right, pressure groups and think-tanksbegan to explore what a French neo-liberalism might look like. And even on thefar-right, a collaborationist and pro-colonial outlook began to give way to amore “modern” ideology based on the ideas of thinkers like Alain de Benoistand the Groupement de recherche et d’�tudes pour la civilisation europ�enne(GRECE) think-tank.29

Yet there was one thing that tied almost all of these disparate intellectualmovements together : a more modest conception of political action. Conceptsthat had been central to post-war French political culture like class or“grandeur” gave way to much more limited and much less voluntaristvocabulary. Autogestion, for instance, implied small-scale management ofindustry at a local level, best exemplified by the way the workers of the LIPwatch company in BesanÅon ran their factory between 1973 and 1976. In thesame way, right-leaning French neo-liberals in the 1970s, like those gathered inthe Association pour la Libert� Economique et le progr�s social (ALEPS)think-tank, emphasized the importance of limited state intervention andprivate enterprise.30 In this respect at least, the 1970s were an unusual momentof transition when large-scale collective concepts did not dominate the Frenchintellectual landscape. In the 1960s, Gaullism had monopolized the availablespace and pushed aside a weakened left. In the late 1980s, a resurgent neo-republicanism would once again bring a transcendental and trans-historicalconcept back into the public imagination. But in the period from the early1970s to the early 1980s, the dominant trend was towards a more modestpolitics that placed the individual and the small group above ideas of class ornation.

II. The Promise and Limits of Civil Society: Giscard d’Estaing’s“société libérale avancée”

Ideas rarely develop in a vacuum and, in 1970s France, the tendency towards amore modest conception of politics was reflected in the high politics of theperiod. We have already briefly discussed the changes on the left thatunderpinned the intellectual reconfigurations of the 1970s. In this section, Iwant to focus on the centre-right and, in particular, Val�ry Giscard d’Estaing’sattempts to create an “advanced liberal society” that would acknowledgedifference and empower French civil society. The rightward shift of the Giscard

29 On this, see amongst others Pierre-Andr� Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite. Jalons d’uneanalyse critique, Paris 1994.

30 Michael Behrent, Justifying Capitalism in an Age of Uncertainty. L’Association pour laLibert� �conomique et le Progr�s Social, 1969 – 1973, in: Chabal, France since the 1970s,pp. 175 – 198.


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presidency and the landslide Socialist victory of 1981 has given the Giscardpresidency (1974 – 1981) an ambiguous place in the historical literature aboutthe Fifth Republic, but this period nevertheless provides a valuable insight intohow France’s political class tried to adapt to the increasing liberalization ofintellectual life and the challenges of political fragmentation.31

Giscard d’Estaing still holds the record for the youngest French president of theFifth Republic. When he was elected in 1974, he was only 48. He had held anumber of ministerial portfolios under de Gaulle and, later, under GeorgesPompidou, but few expected him to win an electoral contest against the moreestablished and better-prepared Jacques Chaban-Delmas. What marked himout from his older competitors, however, was his successful marketingstrategy. In a sign of things to come, his campaign broke with the principles ofGaullism by acknowledging the importance of youth and the power of themedia.32 The young candidate appeared on posters with his 13-year-olddaughter and encouraged popular personalities like Charles Aznavour andJohnny Hallyday to endorse his candidature. It was a highly lucrative strategy.While far-left organizations in the mid-1970s were denouncing the perniciousspread of consumer capitalism, Giscard d’Estaing concentrated on winningover centrist voters who were sceptical of 1968 but welcomed a change inpolitical style.This was most obvious in Giscard d’Estaing’s enthusiastic support forliberalism – an unfashionable ideology, but one which had deep roots amongstFrance’s political elites. Even during the high tide of Gaullism in the 1960s,there had been influential voices arguing in favour of liberal reform. The bestexample of this was the Club Jean Moulin, founded in 1958 by Daniel Cordierand St�phane Hessel in the wake of de Gaulle’s seizure of power.33 It broughttogether intellectuals and policymakers throughout the 1960s and acted as animportant conduit for liberalism and a critique of the power of the French stateboth on the non-Communist left (Michel Rocard was a prominent member)and on the centre-right. Members of the Club published regularly in Le Mondeand collaborated on a series of publications that emphasized the need for a newform of democracy that would allow France to liberalize its state and society.Of particular interest in this context is the complex figure of Michel Crozier,one of the most important intellectuals of the 1970s and a long-time member of

31 The one major attempt to document the entirety of the Giscard years has been SergeBerstein and Jean-FranÅois Sirinelli (eds.), Les ann�es Giscard, 4 vols. , Paris 2003 – 2010.They cover economic policy, European policy, social policy and institutional changeduring the Giscard presidency.

32 On this see Raymond Depardon (Director), 1974, une partie de campagne, France 1974.The documentary was released in 2002. For a more general analysis of the role of culturein political life in the 1970s, see Gui Xi Young, FranÅois Mitterrand. A CulturedCandidate, Ph. D. Diss. University of Cambridge 2016.

33 Claire Andrieu, Pour l’amour de la R�publique. Le Club Jean Moulin, 1958 – 1970, Paris2002.





the Club Jean Moulin. Crozier started life as an organizational sociologist but,after several periods of work abroad in the United States, became one of themost trenchant critics of the “sclerosis” of the French administration andFrench business. His enormously popular essay “La soci�t� bloqu�e” (1970), inwhich he outlined the myriad ways in which France was a “blocked” societyunable to reform its institutions and its hierarchical structures, was not onlyone of the decade’s academic bestsellers, but also a perfect distillation of theClub Jean Moulin’s critique.34

The Club Jean Moulin was dissolved in 1970, but this was not because it hadbeen marginalized. On the contrary, its influence had never been greater.Several of its members now worked for the new Gaullist Prime Minister,Jacques Chaban-Delmas, whose inaugural speech on 16 September 1969 laiddown the template for a liberal nouvelle soci�t�. Chaban-Delmas argued thatFrench society had become stagnant, hard to reform and weighed down by aheavy state. Its intermediary bodies had been stifled and it was struggling toadapt to a decolonized, urbanized and technological society. Chaban-Delmaseven cited Crozier’s idea of a soci�t� bloqu�e in the opening line of his speechand invoked Tocqueville halfway through.35 This confirmed what everyoneknew: that the tone and orientation of the speech were heavily inspired by theliberal ideas of the Club Jean Moulin. Yet despite the powerful rhetoric, theGaullist centre-right was not ready for such an overtly liberal programme andChaban-Delmas found it difficult to implement reforms. He was eventuallyousted as Prime Minister in 1972 in favour of the more consensual PierreMessmer. Nevertheless, Giscard d’Estaing’s victory two years later can be seenas a successful attempt of the young liberal to outflank his rival. Chaban-Delmas laid the foundations but it was Giscard d’Estaing who brought theliberal project to fruition.The pre-eminent expression of Giscard d’Estaing’s vision for France was hisessay “D�mocratie franÅaise”. Published in 1976, two years after he had beenelected, it laid out in detail what the new president intended to achieve. By wayof introduction, it identified two problems in contemporary France: ademographic and economic revolution connected to the baby-boom and theend of post-war industrialization; and the exhaustion of traditional politicalideologies. In Giscard d’Estaing’s view, these problems called for a radicalreassessment of how the French state interacted with the French people. Hencewhy the solutions he proposed – greater social pluralism, individual initiative,a more responsible form of economic development, and the democratizationof society – addressed social questions as much as the economy.36 Althoughthese policies were a clear extension of Chaban-Delmas’s nouvelle soci�t�

34 Michel Crozier, La soci�t� bloqu�e, Paris 1970.35 Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Discours d’investiture, 16. 9. 1969, http://www.assemblee-

nationale.fr/histoire/Chaban1969.asp.36 Val�ry Giscard d’Estaing, D�mocratie franÅaise, Paris 1976.


254 Emile Chabal



project, Giscard’s grappled more openly with the conflicting strands of theliberal revival: he drew on the radical liberal revival in his social policy, butretained the conservative liberalisms of Aron and Crozier in his analysis ofeconomic and foreign policy.37

“D�mocratie franÅaise” was not all empty talk. The Giscard presidency wascharacterized by a number of social and political reforms that conformed to theliberal principles set out by the president himself. The deregulation of France’smajor TV station (ORTF), the first tentative steps towards an environmentalpolicy, and a modest reform of the Conseil constitutionnel all indicated Giscardd’Estaing’s desire to liberalize the French state and make it more receptive tonew ideas. Likewise, the new administration put forward a number of key socialreforms, including the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18, the legalisationof divorce and abortion, and the abolition of the death penalty. Only the last ofthese reforms did not pass through parliament. All the others were successfullyimplemented, even the so-called “Loi Veil” on abortion, which provoked adeluge of violent criticism by right-wing deputies. Lastly, the budgetaryausterity of the 1976 Plan Barre, which was designed to bring rampant inflationunder control, was undeniably marked by an emerging neo-liberalism. Giscardd’Estaing did not suddenly turn his back on a long French tradition of economicdirigisme since he and finance minister Raymond Barre were happy to continueusing the state to ration the allocation of credit and bolster state investment inhuge infrastructural projects such as nuclear energy and the trains � grandevitesse (TGV). But the economic priorities of the Giscard years made clear thatneo-liberal economic policies might be required to limit the effects of the post-Trente Glorieuses economic crisis.38

If the early years of the Giscard presidency demonstrated the vitality of Frenchliberalism, the later years showed its limits. In part, this was a straightforwardquestion of political survival. As the threat from the left began to increase,especially after the legislative elections of 1978, Giscard d’Estaing and hisministers tacked to the right. With the re-emergence of Cold War hostilities atthe end of the 1970s, they used the language of anti-Communism to discreditthe Common Programme and stoke electoral fears about Communistparticipation in government. By the time of the 1981 presidential election,Giscard d’Estaing appeared to be an embattled and disorientated leader. Hewas harshly sanctioned by the electorate who massively endorsed FranÅoisMitterrand and the young activists of the PS. But this defeat did not bring theliberalizing project to an end. Much was made at the time about Mitterrand’s“rupture” with capitalism, which seemed diametrically opposed to the soft

37 Mathias Bernard, Le projet giscardien face aux contraintes du pouvoir, in: Serge Bersteinand Jean-FranÅois Sirinelli (eds.), Les ann�es Giscard. Les r�formes de soci�t�, Paris2007, pp. 13 – 26.

38 FranÅois Denord, La conversion au n�o-lib�ralisme. Droite et lib�ralisme �conomiquedans les ann�es 1980, in: Mouvements 5. 2004, pp. 17 – 23.





business-orientated liberalism of the Giscard years, but more recent analyseshave suggested that the 1980s actually saw a continuation of the liberalizingproject of the 1970s.39 This was apparent in the Socialist abolition of the deathpenalty, an aborted measure from 1974, and the commitment to politicaldecentralization and cultural pluralism, both of which had featured in“D�mocratie franÅaise”, albeit in a more modest form. Moreover, onceMitterrand accepted the necessity of budgetary austerity in 1983, the economicpolicies of the Socialists were almost indistinguishable from those of RaymondBarre in the late 1970s. Even as the Socialists rejected the language of liberalismin their political rhetoric, they found themselves implementing policies similarto those of their centre-right predecessors.40

The impact of the liberal political moment of the 1970s was also visible morebroadly across French society. Recent work has begun to show how politicalsupport for the development of “civil society” and intermediary organizationsspurred on a huge increase in local associations. This was visible in the renewal ofurban policy across France in the 1970s. Two excellent examples of this areGrenoble and Montpellier, both of which had moderate Socialist mayors in the1970s: Hubert Dubedout in Grenoble from 1965 to 1983 and Georges FrÞche inMontpellier from 1977 to 2004. At the time, both of these figures were close to thereformist deuxi�me gauche current and they were influenced by the liberal critiqueof the Club Jean Moulin in the 1960s. Once in power, the two mayors set aboutcreating a wide array of institutions to bring the state closer to individual citizens.Dubedout, for example, set up the non-partisan Groupes d’action municipale(GAM) in Grenoble in the mid-1960s as an experiment in participatory democracythat would be more responsive to local needs. Eventually, the GAMs spread acrossthe entire country in the early 1970s and became a template both for theautogestion-inspired left and the liberal right.41 FrÞche followed in the footsteps ofDubedout by creating a network of neighbourhood community centres called“Maison pour tous” across Montpellier after his election in 1977. These weredesigned to provide spaces for locals to meet, as well as offering easier access tomunicipal services. They were a huge success and were widely copied by othercities in the 1980s. They are often cited as the main reason why FrÞche was able toremain mayor of the city for almost thirty years.42

39 Mathias Bernard, Les ann�es Mitterrand. Du changement socialiste au tournant lib�ral,Paris 2015.

40 On this transition, see amongst others the insightful analysis in Jonah Levy,Tocqueville’s Revenge. State, Society and Economy in Contemporary France, Cam-bridge, MA 1999.

41 Jean-Pierre Bernard et al. , Les Groupes d’action municipale dans le syst�me politiquelocal. Grenoble, Valence, Chamb�ry, in: Revue franÅaise de science politique 22. 1972,pp. 296 – 318.

42 Emile Chabal, Le Pr�sident? Georges FrÞche and the Making of a Local Notable in Late20th Century France, in: Philip Whalen and Patrick Young (eds.), Place and Locality inModern France, 1750 – Present, London 2014, pp. 204 – 217.


256 Emile Chabal



There were many other indications that the “advanced liberal society” that Giscardd’Estaing had imagined was not simply a construct of his imagination. Althoughmuch cultural, urban and youth policy is associated with the period after theSocialist victory of 1981, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that structures werealready well in place before that. For instance, some scholars have pointed to thedevelopment of an explicit youth policy in the 1970s and the exponentialincrease in the number of animateurs (youth group leaders) as a sign that theFrench state was beginning to adapt to growing diversity in French society.43 Evenin the private sector, the 1970s were a time when managerial hierarchies werebreaking down as businesses tried to respond to the criticisms of intellectuals likeCrozier who believed that French firms were ossified and uncompetitive.44

None of this is supposed to suggest that France was an exceptionally liberal societyat the end of the 1970s, nor do I mean to say that French politics became entirelycomfortable with the language of liberalism in this period.45 There was a good dealof resistance to the liberalizing reforms of the 1970s from Communists, Catholics,conservatives and disgruntled Gaullists. Yet it is clear that the Giscard presidencyreflected and magnified a growing liberal tendency within French politics. Onemight argue that, just as Giscard d’Estaing outflanked Chaban-Delmas bypromising a more authentic liberalism in 1974, Mitterrand’s young Socialists didthe same to Giscard d’Estaing in 1981. At first sight, this might appear to be arather counter-intuititive claim. After all, most Socialist politicians who wereelected in 1981 had grandiose plans for a form of modernized state socialismthat seems sharply at odds with ideas of a modest state and a liberal society. But theexplicitly anti-liberal and neo-republican backlash in the party in the late 1980sdemonstrates just how far the PS benefited from – and took advantage of – theliberalizing tendencies of the 1970s.

III. The Pressures of the Past: Immigration and Memory inPostcolonial France

In this final section, I want to leave intellectual and high politics to look moreclosely at associative life in France. Were the intellectual reconfigurations ofthe 1970s reflected in civil society activism? How did activists respond to themore liberal, modest and individualist model of political action that was beingpromoted by France’s political leaders? An excellent case study of the impact ofthese changes on French civil society is the politics of immigration and

43 Jean-Claude Gillet, Animation et animateurs. Le sens de l’action, Paris 2000.44 Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann and Pierre Gr�mion, �lites intellectuelles et r�forme de l’�tat.

Esquisse en trois temps d’un d�placement d’expertise’, in: Cahiers internationaux desociologie cxxvi. 2009, pp. 39 – 59.

45 On the historical weakness of French liberalism see for example Tony Judt, PastImperfect. French Intellectuals, 1944 – 1956, Oxford 1986 and rather less polemicallySudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France, Oxford 1994.





colonial memory. This very new form of activism was a product of the 1970sand was shaped by its priorities. It thus brings together many of the broaderissues discussed earlier. For instance, just like their counterparts in Frenchuniversities, the leaders of left-wing immigrant organizations adapted Marx-ism to specific contemporary ethical problems such as racism and historicalmemory. Likewise, general calls for the “democratization” of society and aright to “difference” were mirrored in immigrant organizations’ strongattachment to identity- and group-based politics, especially as they sought tomake claims to the state. The exact nature of these claims inevitably varieddepending on whether the group in question was demanding action to protectNorth African communities from racism or seeking compensation for thepied-noir community. But, either way, the immigrant activism of the 1970s wasa reminder that the creation of a new political culture was not simply a top-down initiative: it also involved grassroots political organizations.Immigration and colonial memory are not questions that have featuredprominently in traditional accounts of the 1970s. The standard view of theseissues is that they belong to later periods. There is a common perception thatimmigrant activism and anti-racism came to prominence in the early 1980s atthe time of the Marche pour l’�galit� et contre le racisme (often called theMarche des beurs) in 1983 and the formation of SOS Racisme in 1984.46

Similarly, the 1970s are often painted as a period when France’s supposed“amnesia” about its colonial past was at its most pronounced.47 If the decade isremembered for anything, it is the official closing of France’s borders in July1974 shortly after Giscard d’Estaing’s election victory. This date has becomecrucial to histories of French immigration as it represents the final turn awayfrom a post-war policy that encouraged immigration from southern Europeand the colonies.48 But this limited picture of how immigration and colonialmemory affected French politics in the 1970s does not stand up to historicalscrutiny. In fact, there was a wide variety of activism amongst postcolonialimmigrant communities. Whether by North African-born Arabs, French-bornsecond-generation ethnic minorities or Algerian pieds-noirs, this activismgradually began to press itself into the mainstream of French politics, as wellelicit a response from the French state.One area where there has been a reassessment of widely-held preconceptions isin relation to the role of immigrants in the protests of 1968 and their aftermath.Historians like Daniel A. Gordon have argued persuasively that immigrantswere not passive bystanders in 1968, but central actors in some of the majorindustrial disputes of the time. Over the next few years, immigrant activists

46 I myself made this argument in Chabal, A Divided Republic, ch. 8.47 The classic text on France’s colonial “amnesia” is Benjamin Stora, La gangr�ne et l’oubli.

La m�moire de la guerre d’Alg�rie, Paris 1991.48 Laurens Sylvain, 1974 et la fermeture des fronti�res. Analyse critique d’une d�cision

�rig�e en turning-point, in: Politix 82. 2008, pp. 69 – 94.


258 Emile Chabal



were inducted into far-left organizations that offered practical and ideologicaltraining. It did not take long, however, for immigrants to break away from themilieu of the French far-left and form their own organizations. The best-known of these was the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (MTA), founded in1972 / 1973. The MTA was unique at the time in its political focus onimmigrants. There were already a number of other organizations thatsupported immigrants, usually related to their specific countries of origin,but the MTA sought to create a broader political front.49 In this, it was largelysuccessful. It was closely involved with the growing number of hunger strikesacross France in 1973 / 1974 in protest at the treatment of illegal immigrants,the so-called sans papiers, and helped to organize marches against theescalation of racist violence in Marseille in the summer of 1973.50 Both of thesehelped to bring the immigrant question to the foreground at a time whenpoliticians were debating whether to restrict immigration in the wake of the oilcrises. Not since the decolonization of Algeria in 1962 had the French publicbeen confronted so explicitly with the political actions of immigrantsthemselves.For all its novelty, though, immigrant activism was not immune to the broaderchanges that were taking place on the French left in the 1970s and the MTAquickly adapted to the exigencies of a more ethical and modest politics. For astart, the MTA could not rely on traditional Marxist or nationalist ideas ofsolidarity, although they were crucial to the ideological backgrounds of manyof its leaders. Instead, the MTA had to create a hybrid conception of politicalactivism that could draw in people from different nationalities, as well asacknowledge the racism of the French working class.51 One of the ways it triedto do so was through cultural activities, especially theatre. Performanceswritten and produced by immigrants flourished in the 1970s. Some, like the AlAssifa theatre troupe who put on a range of sketches and plays in the period of1973 to 1976, were closely linked to the MTA. Others, like Kateb Yacine whoseplay “Mohamed, prends ta valise” was seen by 75,000 theatregoers in 1971,were not.52 In both cases the effect was the same: the consequences of workerexploitation were passed through the medium of culture rather than throughstrikes and meetings.

49 Daniel A. Gordon, Immigrants and Intellectuals. May ‘68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism inFrance, Pontypool 2012, pp. 120 – 150.

50 Abdellali Hajjat, Le MTA et la “gr�ve g�n�rale” contre le racism de 1973, in: Plein Droit67. 2005, http://www.gisti.org/spip.php?article4337.

51 For a closer analysis of the MTA’s ideas of ethnicity and nation, see Rabah Aissaoui,Immigration and National Identity. North African Political Movements in Colonial andPostcolonial France, London 2009, Part III: “North African Migrants in the PostcolonialPeriod. The MTA in 1970s’ France.”

52 Ang�line Escafr�-Dublet, Culture et immigration. De la question sociale � l’enjeupolitique, 1958 – 2007, Rennes 2014, pp. 100 – 115.





Indeed, the cultural mobilization of immigrant communities in the 1970s wasso successful that the French state began to take notice. The creation of aSecr�tariat d’�tat aux travailleurs immigrants in 1974 was the belatedrecognition that decolonization had not put to rest the question of immigrantworkers.53 Soon after, the inauguration of l’Office national de promotionculturelle des immigr�s in 1976 indicated the importance that cultural policynow had in the French state’s project to “insert” (ins�rer) immigrants intoFrench society. In the period between 1976 and 1981, this new departmentfinanced television programmes that “celebrated” the cultures of differentimmigrant communities, most famously Mosaques, and developed theprovision of foreign languages in French schools to include the languages ofspecific immigrant communities such as Arabic or Turkish. None of theseinitiatives was particularly successful but they laid the foundations for themuch more active politics of cultural difference of the early years of theSocialist government after 1981.54 As in so many other areas, the 1970s markedthe beginning of a new kind of politics: in this case, one that was more attunedto the growing diversity of French society.The MTA, too, changed with the times. It was officially dissolved in the late1970s and a number of its former leaders set up the magazine Sans Fronti�re.More focused on telling the stories of immigrants and appealing to a second-generation that was less connected with the nationalist struggles of the 1950sand 1960s, Sans Fronti�re marked a shift away from the ostensibly revolu-tionary politics of the post-1968 years towards a more consensual form ofidentity-based activism.55 This transformation was completed in 1987 with thesetting-up of G�n�riques, an organization that aimed to “bring to publicattention the history and memory of immigration”. Today, G�n�riques has asubstantial digital and physical library of documents related to the struggle forimmigrant rights in France.56 It is revealing that an organization that started asa militant trade union had, by the late 1980s, become a repository of historyand memory. Such a change perfectly illustrates how the “ethical turn” shiftedthe focus of the French left in the late 1970s. It is also a reminder that theidentity politics that came to dominate French politics in the final decades ofthe twentieth century had its roots in the political reconfigurations of the1970s.

53 For the French state’s response to labour migration around the period of decolonization,see especially Neil Macmaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, 1900 – 1962, Basingstoke1997 and Amelia Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole. Algerian Families andthe French Welfare State during Decolonization, London 2013.

54 Escafr�-Dublet, Culture et immigration, ch. 4 and 5.55 Daniel A. Gordon, Sans Fronti�re and Immigrant Memory at the Dawn of the 1980s, in:

Chabal, France since the 1970s, pp. 115 – 128.56 G�n�riques maintain an interactive website, with full details of their collections,

G�n�riques, http://www.generiques.org/.


260 Emile Chabal



We can see many of the same processes at work in the history of pied-noiractivism in the 1970s. Most accounts of postcolonial immigrant activism haveexcluded the pieds-noirs, which is the colloquial term given to the Europeansettlers of Algeria, the vast majority of whom left at the moment ofindependence in 1962. This is hardly surprising since the pieds-noirs werevilified across the French political spectrum, especially the left, as symbols ofFrance’s violent colonial past.57 Whereas the MTA and other immigrantorganizations were dealing with the exploitation of vulnerable and precariousimmigrant workers, pied-noir organizations were seen as mere forums for aformer colonizing class to reminisce about the greatness of the French empire.But, while such political judgements are understandable, they hamper ourability to understand the origins of identity politics in France. If nothing else,the pieds-noirs deserve to be considered alongside other postcolonialimmigrants for numerical reasons alone: The mass exodus of almost onemillion pieds-noirs in 1962 represents the largest immigration into France inthe post-war period, and one of the largest population movements in Europesince the “return” of Expellees to Germany after World War Two.58 Moreover,just like the waves of migration of non-European Algerians and Moroccans inthe 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the arrival of the pieds-noirs was a product ofdecolonization. The fact that the pieds-noirs were often sympathetic tocolonialism does not mean that their political opinions were unimportant, nordoes it mean that their patterns of mobilization diverged radically from thoseof other immigrant populations in France.The early years of pied-noir politics in France followed that of other recently-arrived populations in concentrating overwhelmingly on the welfare of thecommunity. With the exception of large, national-level organizations like theAssociation nationale des FranÅais d’Afrique du Nord, d’Outre-Mer et de leursamis (ANFANOMA), founded in 1956, most pied-noir organizations in theaftermath of the exodus revolved around individuals in cities like Montpellierand Marseille.59 Inevitably, the focus was on material matters, for instance,housing and job transfers, and the overall tone of pieds-noirs publications in thelate 1960s was one of loss, betrayal and material concern.60 As with otherimmigrants, the pieds-noirs first needed to secure their status within

57 For a more complete history of the pieds-noirs and their integration into French society,see Val�rie Esclangon-Morin, Les rapatri�s d’Afrique du nord, de 1956 � nos jours, Paris2012; Andrea Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe. Maltese Settlers inAlgeria and France, London 2006.

58 Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen (eds.), Vetriebene and Pieds-Noirs in PostwarGermany and France. Comparative Perspectives, Basingstoke [2016].

59 Emile Chabal, Managing the Postcolony. Minority Politics in Montpellier,c. 1960 – c. 2010, in: Contemporary European History 23. 2014, pp. 237 – 258, herep. 244.

60 The magazine of the ANFANOMA, France-Horizon, offers a glimpse into the responsesof pieds-noirs to the early years of settlement in France.





metropolitan France before they could elaborate a more sustained form ofpolitical engagement.By the early 1970s, the condition of the pieds-noirs had improved significantly.They had received unprecedented support from the state in the form ofhousing and subsidies to help them reintegrate into French society, and thevast majority had found satisfactory jobs in a still-booming Trente Glorieuseseconomy. But these material improvements did not translate into politicalquiescence. On the contrary, politically-motivated pieds-noirs used their new-found security to launch a systematic attack on a French republic they felt hadignored them for too long.61

Two developments stand out in this story. The first is the founding of the Cerclealg�rianiste by a group of young pieds-noirs in November 1973. Dedicated tothe preservation of pied-noir memory, the organization could not have beenmore unequivocal in its attempts to reclaim history : its inaugural manifestostated clearly its aim to overturn “the official history of the French presence inAlgeria as it has been presented by those very same people who condemned usto exile”.62 To this end, the Cercle set up a magazine called L’Alg�rianiste in1977 that acted as a vehicle for pied-noir nostalgia.63 It featured semi-fictionalized accounts of life in colonial Algeria, personal reminiscences, andoccasionally political editorials. This national-level discourse was reinforcedby local branches, which organized meetings and cultural activities. The aimwas to preserve the memory of colonialism and ensure that it would beremembered correctly by subsequent generations of French people. Severalyears before Sans Fronti�re and more than a decade before G�n�riques, thepieds-noirs provided a template for identity politics in postcolonial France –one that primarily emphasized questions of memory and history.The second key moment in the history of pied-noir activism in France is thefounding of the Rassemblement et coordination unitaires des rapatri�s etspoli�s (RECOURS) in 1976.64 Led by the charismatic and media-friendlyJacques Roseau, RECOURS rapidly rose to prominence as the first post-warimmigrant organization to promote an explicitly electoralist strategy. Thisconsisted of identifying politicians who had voted against or otherwiseobstructed the numerous compensation laws for the pieds-noirs and other

61 For a fuller history of pied-noir activism, see Claire Eldridge, From Empire to Exile. ThePied-Noir and Harki Communities in France, 1962 – 2015, Manchester 2016.

62 This quotation is taken from the Cercle Alg�rianiste’s original manifesto from 1November 1973, which was reproduced on the front cover of L’Alg�rianiste, 104. 2003.

63 For theories of colonial / imperial nostalgia, see Patricia Lorcin, Historicizing ColonialNostalgia. European Women’s Narratives of Algeria and Kenya 1900 – Present,Basingstoke 2011.

64 A more complete history of RECOURS can be found in Claire Eldridge, “Fiers de notrepass� et forts de nos liens fraternelles”. Questions of Unity and Solidarity between Pied-Noir Associations, unpublished conference paper presented at the Institut HistoriqueAllemand, Paris, March 2012.


262 Emile Chabal



colonial rapatri�s that were submitted to the Assembl�e nationale in the 1970sand 1980s. The aim was then to unseat these politicians using the power of thepied-noir bloc vote in vulnerable constituencies. RECOURS published thenames of politicians in the hope that this would either persuade them to fall inline or have them removed from office at the next election. It was anextraordinarily bold strategy and one that drew some spectacular successes inthe 1977 municipal elections in the south of France where there were large pied-noir communities. FrÞche, for instance, was a beneficiary of the pied-noir votein Montpellier. A decade later, in 1986, this same strategy forced concessionsfrom the newly-elected centre-right government of Jacques Chirac, whichresulted in a major new compensation law in 1987. RECOURS had shown thatpostcolonial identity politics did not have to limit itself to history and memoryalone. It could also have a direct influence on electoral politics.65 Much later inthe 1990s and 2000s, Muslim organizations tried to use similar tactics in localelections, but no postcolonial immigrant community has been as effective asthe pieds-noirs in gaining electoral momentum.66

Of course, one could easily object that straightforward racism explains thedifference between the relative success of the pied-noir electoral strategy andthe singular failure of other postcolonial immigrants to penetrate mainstreampolitics in France. But this does not take away from the fact that the 1970s sawthe emergence of a whole variety of immigrant activism that revolved aroundquestions of justice, memory and political participation.67 The MTA and theCercle alg�rianiste were almost certainly not what Giscard d’Estaing had inmind when he talked about an advanced liberal society with a vibrant civilsociety, but these organizations nevertheless benefitted from a politicalenvironment in which expressions of cultural difference were becoming moreand more acceptable. While these tentative first steps appear rather tame incomparison to the heavily state-sponsored politics of difference in the early1980s or the explosion of interest in colonial memory since the early 2000s,they were necessary building blocks. By the late 1970s, identity politics hadbecome an essential part of French political culture.

65 For the longer history of pied-noir political engagement, see Emmanuelle Comtat, Lespieds-noirs et la politique. Quarante ans apr�s le retour, Paris 2009.

66 On the relative failure of Muslim participation in French politics, see Timothy Peace,European Social Movements and Muslim Activism. Another World but with Whom?,Basingstoke 2015; Claude Dargent, Le vote des musulmans, Paris 2011, http://www.cevipof.com/rtefiles/File/AtlasEl3/NoteDARGENT.pdf.

67 Isabelle Veyrat-Masson and Pascal Blanchard (eds.), Les guerres de m�moires. La Franceet son histoire, Paris 2010.





IV. The Birth of Postmodern Politics in France?

In the 1974 film “Les valseuses”, the young actors G�rard D�pardieu andPatrick Dewaere play two delinquent men in search of stimulation. Theirminds seem to be focused on little more than casual misogyny, casual sex andcasual violence. They roam the streets of France throwing stones at an absentor complacent bourgeoisie. The message is that they are children of a TrenteGlorieuses that has let them down, an impression reinforced by the numerousshots of bleak, post-industrial wastelands. With its nihilism and its crassapproach to sex, it hardly seemed like a box office smash, and yet it was one ofthe most successful films of the year. More than five million cinemagoers wentto see it across France. Was this because of the film’s shock value? Or was itbecause the French in 1974 recognized something of their own experiences inthe brittle personalities of D�pardieu and Dewaere? Either way, time has notbeen kind to the film. Today, it looks dated and tired, rather like the Frenchcollective memory of the 1970s as a whole. Lipovetsky’s judgement on the “ageof emptiness” seems to have been confirmed: Politically, at least, the 1970sappear to many French people as an awkward moment between the greatnessof de Gaulle and the flawed greatness of Mitterrand, both of whom remain byfar the most popular presidents of the Fifth Republic.68

But there is more to the 1970s than ephemeral political figures and economiccrisis. As much as subsequent leaders have tried to deny it, this transitionaldecade had profound consequences for French politics. The frontal assault onMarxism in French intellectual life in the 1970s precipitated the terminaldecline of the PCF, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of theSoviet Union. It also paved the way for a left-wing political engagement thatwas both more ethically-grounded and more modest. For the most part, thisremains the central DNA of today’s PS. In a similar vein, the domestication ofliberalism in the 1970s penetrated deeply into French politics. Since then, boththe centre-left and the centre-right have struggled with the paradox of theGiscard presidency : how to enact liberal reform in France without gettingdefeated at the ballot box. Certainly, the Sarkozy presidency’s mix of liberal“Atlanticism” and hardline attitudes towards migration bore more than simplya genealogical resemblance to the Giscard years. Finally, the nascentpostcolonial identity politics of the 1970s has now become an unavoidablepart of the French political landscape. It does not take too much imagination tosee the violent controversy over the 2005 law on the “positive” effects of French

68 A 2014 BVA poll asked voters on 18 May 2014 “Selon vous, qui est ou a �t� le meilleurPr�sident de la V�me R�publique?”: 36 % said Charles de Gaulle; 27 % said FranÅoisMitterrand; only 8 % said Val�ry Giscard d’Estaing. BVA et al. , Les FranÅais et Val�ryGiscard d’Estaing, http://www.bva.fr/data/sondage/sondage_fiche/1534/fichier_bva_-pour_le_parisien-aujourdhui_en_france_-_valery_giscard_destaing5dbf9.pdf.


264 Emile Chabal



colonization as a re-enactment of debates from the 1970s between pied-noirgroups and the MTA over colonial memory.69

Perhaps, then, the best way of describing the political configurations of the1970s is in terms of the birth of a “postmodern” form of politics. By this, Imean a politics that is fluid, unstable, and marked by a growing desire to appealto the narratives of specific groups within society.70 France was not exceptionalin this regard; other developed countries were facing similar problems.71 Butthe French case highlights how difficult it has been for European societies toaccommodate these changes. Predictably, since the 1970s there have beenrepeated backlashes against postmodern politics in the form of the FrontNational’s ethno-nationalist politics of racism and the revival of neo-republican ideas like la�cit�.72 These have offered strong values and normativecertainty as a way of counter-acting the tendency amongst sympathetic liberalsand far-left activists to deconstruct hierarchies and power structures after1968. Nevertheless, this constitutive tension between a postmodern politicsthat was born in the 1970s and a French political class still yearning for thereturn of grand narratives and grand ideologies remains at the heart ofFrance’s current political crisis. One can only hope that a reassessment of the1970s helps to rehabilitate an unfashionable decade that still holds importantlessons for the twenty-first century.

Dr. Emile Chabal, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University ofEdinburgh, Teviot Place, EH8 9AG Edinburgh, UKE-Mail: [email protected]

69 The 2005 law entitled “Loi portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationaleen faveur des FranÅais rapatri�s” was, as the title suggests, heavily sponsored by pied-noir organizations who saw it as part of a long-term project to gain compensation andrecognition. In the end, only the controversial article 4 on how French schools shouldteach the “positive” aspects of colonization, was repealed; the rest of the law remains onthe books. For a detailed account of the law and its implications, see Claude Liauzu andGilles Manceron, La colonisation, la loi et l’histoire, Paris 2006.

70 I draw here on ideas in Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Oxford 2000.71 For the American case, see for instance Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture, London 2011.72 I discuss in more detail the political changes in France in the 1980s and 1990s in Chabal,

A Divided Republic, ch. 1 – 4.





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